Paris climate accord critics praise and defend US withdrawal

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

So advises an African proverb appended to a 2009 open letter to President Obama, presented as a New York Times full-page ad . The letter advocated the global climate-change pact that 192 countries were negotiating in Copenhagen. The signatory business leaders included Donald J. Trump and three of his kids. In 2015, 195 countries agreed in Paris to limit global warming. In 2017, President Trump has announced that after all, the US will go alone, not together.

Why?

Probably most supporters of scientists’ climate consensus care little about reasons offered for the pullout. Likely they join the New York Times editors who condemned it as “disgraceful.” But they might not yet be focused on further inevitable political challenges. Little noticed last month was the call by veteran national physics leader Steve Koonin, writing in the Wall Street Journal, for what amounts to a politicized national climate-change debate . The White House has reportedly expressed interest. This month, the conservative syndicated columnist Cal Thomas has advocated such a debate not once but twice . Anti-consensus politics might soon matter increasingly.

So what reasons for withdrawal are offered? The president conveyed some in a White House Rose Garden speech , but reasons have also been offered in the media, where a noteworthy fraction of the commentary has applauded the exit announcement.

Breitbart, the news organization formerly run by senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, proclaimed the “real reason” for the pullout in an article by anti-consensus crusader James Delingpole. He explained that when “you’ve got your fellow leaders of the free world insulting you” and “treating you like you’re some kind of an idiot,” you must “call those charlatans’ bluff.” In tone and substance, that may help explain why liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman charged that the real reason is “sheer spite.”

Krugman also accuses “influential conservatives” of clinging to “what is basically a crazy conspiracy theory—that the overwhelming scientific consensus that the earth is warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions is a hoax, somehow coordinated by thousands of researchers around the world.” He declares that this effectively constitutes “the mainstream Republican position.”

That’s reportedly true for the 13 June gubernatorial primary in Virginia, where odd-year statewide elections are studied for indications about national political trends. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reports that though both Democrat candidates oppose the Paris withdrawal, all three Republicans support it and “cast doubt on the significance of man’s role in climate change.” Breitbart recently quoted the right-wing radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh dismissing manmade “planetary destruction” as a “nonexistent issue.”

But in fact an anecdotal, unscientific media sampling shows that at least for some Paris opponents, the climate-change-scoffing dimension of the reasoning is more complicated. Some withdrawal-approving critics of the Paris accord seem to understand why two years ago, Reagan-era secretary of state George Shultz asserted that the “globe is warming,” that carbon dioxide “has something to do with that,” and that people saying otherwise “will wind up being mugged by reality.” After the Paris exit announcement, a Weekly Standard commentary offered criticisms of the discarded pact, but observed that “the most important event of this week may be that the president never said that climate change is not real.” Pact-criticizing opinion pieces at the Washington Examiner , the Australian , and the Federalist accepted the reality.

Complementing that acceptance among Paris-pact critics were a few calls for climate-motivated innovation and research. Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, formerly an adviser and speechwriter for President George W. Bush, calls the pact weak but the need for energy R&D strong. Similar comments appeared in opinion pieces from pact critics at the Wall Street Journal , the New York Post , and the UK’s Telegraph .

A few such critics noted that the US has already been achieving emissions declines. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins attributed that to fracking, then continued, inserting a note of political sarcasm: “The same economy may soon also be able to take credit for slowing China’s prodigious emissions growth thanks to natural gas exports to displace Chinese coal. That country is the U.S. under the unthinkable monster Donald Trump. Whatever evolution toward a lower-carbon energy system takes place in the future, it will also certainly be driven overwhelmingly by technology and markets, not policy.”

Faith in technology and markets dominated much of the support that appeared in the media for the president’s departure decision. “What the nation won’t do, thanks to the president,” declared the New York Post, “is devastate its own economy against the public’s wishes in order to satisfy the global elite. Count this as a major Trump promise kept.” The UK’s Telegraph advised , “Rather than binding the hands of business with targets, it makes far more sense to deregulate, encourage investment and liberate the new markets for green technologies.” An editorial at the Australian argued , “technology and business are key to cutting carbon.”

(Among the pact’s critics, none appeared to credit the January open letter to Trump and Congress that, as the New York Times pointed out , came from “630 businesses and investors” with “names like DuPont, Hewlett Packard and Pacific Gas and Electric.” It asked leaders “to continue supporting low-carbon policies, investment in a low-carbon economy and American participation in the Paris agreement.”)

Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal gave a sarcastic, figurative name—"rounding error"—to what’s probably, among media commentaries, the most commonly adduced reason for supporting the pullout. He wrote :

National Review editor Rich Lowry similarly repurposed that arithmetic term to make the same point : the Paris pact is feckless. At the Federalist, Keith Hennessey illustrated that alleged fecklessness by inventing another name for the now-discarded accord: QTIIPS, which “stands for Quantitatively Trivial Impact + Intense Political Symbolism.” The Washington Examiner scorned the pact as “a big flashy set of empty promises.” The Federalist‘s David Harsanyi disdained it as “substantively a joke.”

In alleging that the Paris accord creates “fake virtue” in its supporters, the Examiner calls to mind Harsanyi’s charge that “widespread rage” about the withdrawal is, “as many people have already noted, a case of mass virtue signaling.” At the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last condemned the accord as a “gaudy hootenanny of international virtue signaling.” The put-down is indeed easy to find in the media discussion, as evidenced in National Review conservative Jonah Goldberg’s admiring observation that Last’s piece indicts “virtue signaling about virtue signaling.”

Wikipedia defines virtue signaling as “the conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of enhancing standing within a social group.” The WSJ‘s Jenkins, in support of the pullout, put it this way: “When a mob is forming, we experience high anxiety if we’re not part of it.”

Do 195 nations coming together in a climate agreement constitute a “mob”? What about the leaders cited in a recent opening paragraph from the right-leaning, Pulitzer Prize–holding columnist Kathleen Parker? The column declares that “the need for a cooperative, global approach to reducing human contributions to climate change is irrefutable.” It begins, “A curious thing happened on President Trump’s way out of the Paris climate accord. American mayors, governors, corporate leaders and others immediately committed to meeting the agreement’s terms anyway.”

Sounds like whether or not they want to go far quickly, they want to go far together.

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.